## RADICAL STUDENTS AND PROFESSORIAL LIBERALISM IN THE DAYS OF OCTOBER 1905
[Between 12 and 19 October 1905]

Comparison of the manuscript of document "a" with the manuscript of the article "Political Strike and Street Struggle in Moscow" made it possible to establish the presence of Lenin's notations proving that doc. "a" was intended by V.I. [Lenin] as an insertion into the aforesaid article; moreover, the place for the insertion was precisely indicated on both manuscripts. The article, however, was printed in issue no. 20 of *Proletarii* without the insertion, but in the following (21st) issue of the newspaper the thoughts and even entire phrases of doc. "a" entered into a separate article by Lenin "Lessons of the Moscow Events." (See Collected Works, vol. VIII, p. 504 note 154.)

## A SHAMEFUL COMEDY

The shameful comedy of the State Duma appears even more contemptible alongside this genuinely revolutionary action of a class ready for struggle and truly progressive. The union of the proletariat with revolutionary democracy, of which we have spoken more than once, is becoming a fact. The radical students, who have adopted the slogans of revolutionary social-democracy both in Petersburg and in Moscow, are the vanguard of all democratic forces that spurn the baseness of the "constitutional-democratic" reformists who have gone into the State Duma, those who are drawn toward genuine decisive struggle with the accursed enemy of the Russian people, and not toward brokerage with autocracy itself.

Look at the liberal professors, rectors, assistant rectors, and this whole coterie of Trubetskoys, Manuylovs, and others. These are the best people of liberalism and the constitutional-democratic party, the most principled, the most educated, the most disinterested, the most free from direct pressure of interests and the influence of the money bag. And how do these best people conduct themselves? How have they made use of their first power, the power of university administration, the power entrusted to them by election? They are already trembling before the revolution, they fear the sharpening and expansion of the movement, they are already extinguishing the fire and trying to bring calm, receiving for this the thoroughly deserved spittle in the face in the form of praise from Princes Meshchersky.

And they were well punished, these philistines of bourgeois science. They closed the university in Moscow, fearing bloodshed in the university. They only provoked an incomparably greater bloodshed in the streets. They wanted to extinguish the revolution in the university; they only ignited revolution in the streets. They fell into a fine vice, together with Messrs. Trepov and the Romanovs, whom they now rushed to convince of the necessity of freedom of assembly: close the university — and you open street struggle. Open the university — and you open a platform for popular revolutionary assemblies preparing new and even more determined fighters for freedom.

How infinitely instructive is the example of these liberal professors for evaluating our State Duma! Is it not now clear, from the experience of the higher schools, that the liberals and constitutionalists-democrats will fear just as much for the "fate of the Duma" as these wretched penny-dreadful knights of threadbare science fear for the "fate of universities"? Is it not now clear that the liberals and constitutionalists-democrats cannot use the Duma otherwise than for an even broader, even more fetid preaching of peaceful legal progress? Is it not now clear how ridiculous are the hopes for transforming the Duma into a revolutionary assembly? Is it not now clear that there is one and only one way to "influence" — not the Duma specifically, not the universities specifically, but the entire old autocratic order — the way of the Moscow workers, the way of popular uprising? It alone will not only compel Ma-